Becoming Stewards: Transforming New Leaders through Reflective Practice

Whether one subscribes to the notion that leadership is simply one of several roles a manager plays in an organization (Mintzberg, 1989) or that management and leadership are two distinct processes, with the latter being the more visionary and inspiring of the two (Kotter, 1990), one cannot dispute the plethora of research on the topic of becoming a leader. In most industries, a leader grows by progressing up an organization’s hierarchy, learning the characteristics of a successful leader from their immediate supervisor and others of similar status. Higher education, conversely, does not follow the same pyramidal organizational form of most industries. For this reason, a different circumstance awaits a new leader in higher education and demands different tools to remedy this.